New AI solution can read and understand biomedical articles, send findings to experts

Researchably is a new service that makes it easier for pharmaceutical companies to analyze and review the thousands of pages of scientific journal articles published every year. In comparison, the "manual" review is cumbersome — the content is complex, requires domain expertise, and the review process is prone to errors due to the repetitive nature and dense materials which must be read, catalogued and passed on to the appropriate stakeholders.

Researchably uses AI and natural language processing (NLP) to read and review these scientific articles, summarize them, and determine which departments they are relevant to faster, making far fewer errors than expert readers. The solution cuts the time to scan and review a paper from an average of 13 minutes per paper when done by a person, to less than one second. Currently the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi is running a pilot with Researchably, as are other major pharmas which cannot be named.

Researchably first categorizes scientific papers at a high level, determining, for example, whether the paper is an observational study or an experimental study. Following that, the platform reads it for specific details and sends researchers a custom stream of appropriate papers culled for specialty and interests.

Sanofi's trial with the Researchably platform is through its medical communications team in China which is tasked with keeping doctors informed about the latest developments in their fields.

"Biomedical research communicated in published literature underpins the pharma industry. Our AI platform makes the entire process of research review exponentially more efficient," said Maciej Szpakowski, CEO of Researchably, said in a statement. "The improvement at Sanofi is remarkable. The small team doing this work previously spent an average of more than 1500-person hours annually. Our platform is freeing up that time. Added to the time-savings is the high value of not making errors; typically, there are three of 10 papers incorrectly categorized, which means important information is not being funneled to the right people who need it. Researchably practically eliminates those errors."